Wednesday, June 4, 2014

According to consultant Tony Schwartz, far too many people
no longer enjoy their work. Worse yet, they hate their work. They go through
the motions, feeling more like drudges than like productive, constructive
members of a company.

In his words:

The way
we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re
probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel
much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most
important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe
that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get
home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until
you fall asleep.

Schwartz believes that people hate their work because there are too many demands on their time and because they are afflicted by digital
technology:

Demand
for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity — draining us of the energy
we need to bring our skill and talent fully to life. Increased competitiveness
and a leaner, post-recession work force add to the pressures. The rise of
digital technology is perhaps the biggest influence, exposing us to an
unprecedented flood of information and requests that we feel compelled to read
and respond to at all hours of the day and night.

As a coach, Schwartz’s job is to help companies better
manage their employees. Thus, he analyzes the problem in terms that admit to a
managerial solution:

Employees
are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core
needs are met: physical, through opportunities to regularly renew and recharge
at work; emotional, by feeling valued and appreciated for their contributions;
mental, when they have the opportunity to focus in an absorbed way on their
most important tasks and define when and where they get their work done; and
spiritual, by doing more of what they do best and enjoy most, and by feeling
connected to a higher purpose at work.

He finds that employees who take occasional breaks do better
overall than employees who never take breaks. He believes, as ought to be clear
to everyone, that employees who are valued and appreciated, who can define
their work process, who can focus on what they do best and who can feel like
they are part of a greater organization feel better about their work.

No one can possibly disagree.

The strange part is that this workplace malaise seems to be of recent coinage. Schwartz explains:

… systematically
investing in employees, beyond paying them a salary, didn’t seem necessary
until recently. So long as employees were able to meet work demands, employers
were under no pressure to address their more complex needs. Increasingly,
however, employers are recognizing that the relentless stress of increased
demand — caused in large part by digital technology — simply must be addressed.

Clearly, Schwartz has some excellent proposals for managing
this problem. I have not outlined them in detail, but those who are interested
would do well to read his full column.

And yet, saying that it has all come about because of
digital technology, the fact that you bring your work with you everywhere, feels slightly oversimplified.

Note well his description Albemarle CEO Luke Kissam’s
experience:

A
little over a year ago, Luke Kissam, the chief executive of Albemarle, a multibillion-dollar
chemical company, sought out one of us, Tony, as a coach to help him deal with
the sense that his life was increasingly overwhelming. “I just felt that no
matter what I was doing, I was always getting pulled somewhere else,” he
explained. “It seemed like I was always cheating someone — my company, my
family, myself. I couldn’t truly focus on anything.”

Kissam does not say that he feels burdened by digital
technology. He says that the problem lies in the way his life is constructed:
he is being called on to be all things to all people, to be everywhere and to do
everything.

If many employees bring their work home, it is fair to ask
how many of them bring their home life into the office?

In the old days, adult life was subjected to a division of
labor. One spouse worked while the other managed the home. The working spouse
could focus fully on his job because he knew that home and family were being
cared for by the non-working or less-working spouse.

Many families today might find this to be desirable, but
fewer and fewer families can afford to do so.

And since our culture now refuses to define roles and
responsibilities, who does what in the family seems always to be subject to
discussion and debate, if not argument. The more discussion, debate and
argument the more stress.

Besides, the stable two-parent home seems to be becoming the
exception rather than the rule.

Over the past four decades the divorce rate has risen and
has stayed unacceptably high. You cannot have a division of household labor in
a one-parent home.

Another question comes to mind: how much of the stress of
work today comes from what we will call, for lack of a better word, multi-culturalism? In a company where a single culture prevails and where everyone has equal
access to it, work will likely be more harmonious than in a company where
different people use different cultural cues.

I do not know enough about a sufficient number of different
work environments to tell you how important or prevalent this is. But surely, a
workplace that insists on respecting diversity in the name of social justice is
not the same as a workplace that offers equal access to a single corporate
culture.

The first will most likely produce a level of stressful
disharmony while the second, where everyone is playing the same game by the
same rules, will not.

It’s true that people have more difficulty focusing, but the
problem seems to be larger than the issue of technological advances.

7 comments:

I am unemployable and have been for some time, but there was a time when I was thought to be valuable, and for most of my working years, I had the good fortune to be paid well for doing stuff I liked to do.

Now days, it looks to me like it is a fools game to look for a good job--the pay cut you have to take is too great.

Twice a week You write on this blog, that Chinese are better, or will be better soon. Maybe employees read this, and wants to be everything for everyone, because perspective of being replaced by Chinese is horrible. Especially, if somebody is not an owner of his own home.

I'm chagrined by articles like this. More thumb sucking about Elite employees who make up a tiny fraction of the workforce. Most sit on their rumps in climate-controlled offices, and whine when they have to fly Economy.

For most of my working life, I was one of them. However, I was well aware of my good fortune.

The vast majority of workers have other concerns. E.g., the physical pain & damage done from standing & walking for 8 or 10 hours. "Sweat workers" have it even harder. I know many.

I've heard bosses' baloney about caring for their people for decades. Pious, hypocritical Hooey.

When did people like their jobs? I want to know. For most people the answer is never.

As for broken families and unfixed roles, yeah it's a problem but when the Communism fell freedom caused problems too because people had to find their way in a world that wasn't pre-ordained. And yet we still think it was good overall.

As for multi-culturalism causing problems, that sounds like baloney. Everyone knows they have to work. That's the key element in any culture.

It is true that many people are disengaged from their jobs, or dislike or even hate them...but this author's diagnosis of the reasons for this do not seem very accurate to me. I think that in reality there are two primary factors:

1) Excessive Taylorization, ie micromanagement of the way the individual performs his job. This is especially true in customer=service jobs, both telephone-based and in physical retail stores. See my post Mindless Verbal Taylorism:

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/8034.html

2) Badly designed organization structures. This tends especially to affect higher-level employees. In many corporations, lack of intelligent thought about how pieces of the organization need to interact with each other makes it very difficult to get things done, which is especially demoralizing to the most talented, committed, and valuable of the employees. Ironically, the general hostility toward hierarchies seems to have made this problem worse, not better.

The problem is micromanagers. And technology helps many managers slip into the micro domain. And, of course, the habitual micromanager powered with the technology has become unbearable.

The tendency toward micromanagement is inculcated in the zero-fail culture of educational conditioning as well as the continued sense of competition rather than cooperation that the edumedication sends into the work place.

Good managers have to come to accept ambiguity. Give the work, trust it will be done, live in doubt until it comes back from the employee. Tough, when you can hover and message to salve your fears.

JKB..."technology helps many managers slip into the micro domain. And, of course, the habitual micromanager powered with the technology has become unbearable."

Yes, there is truth in this. Before modern telecommunications, a certain level of decentralization was forced by the constraints of geography and time...think a captain at sea, a military commander in the field, or even a regional sales manager. Now, avoidance of micromanagement requires conscious decision on the part of the manager.